California DSA and Higher Education Labor United (HELU)
NY State Senator Lea Webb and leaders of the three largest bargaining units at Binghamton University show their support for SUNY Potsdam. From left to right, GSEA President Camille Gagnier, Senator Lea Webb, UUP Chapter President Brendan McGovern, CSEA Executive Vice President Jeff Zepkowski.
DSA in California is disproportionally education workers, especially higher ed workers. These people are also likely to be union members. HELU is an organization that ties together labor and higher ed in a way that socialists will recognize in its motto, “wall-to-wall and coast-to-coast”—which echoes “Medicare for All,” “An injury to one is an injury to all,” “Solidarity forever,” and “Everybody in, nobody out.” HELU attempts to organize local unions and labor organizations to implement this motto as a national response to the crisis in higher ed. This creates an opening for California DSA members to engage in a national conversation with local impacts.
Where HELU came from
When Bernie Sanders, despite winning California, did not become the Democratic Party candidate in 2020, many people active in that campaign took a time-out. Among these were people who came from higher ed organizing: grad students, union staff and leaders, activists from the various parts of the contingent faculty movement, scholars of all sorts concerned about the crisis in higher ed, and, not surprisingly, quite a few DSA members. A piece of Bernie’s platform had been a focus on labor in higher ed but once Biden faced a GOP-dominated Congress, it was obvious that the path forward was not going to go through party politics. It was going to have to go through organizing. But what kind of organizing?
Why wall-to-wall?
By focusing on labor rather than, for example, academic freedom, HELU acknowledged that higher ed workers who probably have the most power to bring runaway managers (and the whole industry, ultimately) into line are clerical, custodial, maintenance, library, tech and the numerous other “non-faculty” job positions without which the whole ship doesn’t sail. So organizing in higher ed would have to mean something way beyond organizing faculty. That’s how “wall-to-wall” became the banner, soon to be expanded to “coast-to-coast,” under which HELU came into being in 2021.
First the organizers held a series of zoom summits, supported by Scholars for a New Deal in Higher Education, Jobs with Justice and the Rutgers University unions. Hundreds of people participated. They produced a vision statement, sufficiently equal to the crisis to quickly gather endorsements from over 100 local unions and labor organizations. Setting a goal of 50 formal members – local unions and labor organizations paying “Solidarity Pledges” like a form of per-caps – they convened their founding Convention in May 2024, elected officers and hired staff. Now began the hard part (see higheredlaborunited.org for what has been done since).
The higher ed crisis changes in character
That was before Biden stepped back for Kamala Harris and of course, before Trump was elected. The crises that HELU thought we faced –student debt, administrative bloat, privatization, casualization of faculty and staff, legislative attempts to wipe out tenure, abolition of DEI programs, the attacks on student and faculty protests, mass layoffs of whole departments and especially adjuncts – were now consolidated into an ideologically empowered top-level GOP agenda intended to drop a veil of ignorance (see Ruth, Shrecker and Johnson’s book The Right To Learn, from Beacon) over the whole country.
What can a newly established – but growing -- organization do in the face of this agenda? And what should be the role of California DSA members?
Attendees at the founding meeting of HELU.
Three challenges facing HELU
The challenges HELU faces in implementing “wall-to-wall and coast-to-coast” are formidable, but none are insurmountable. HELU already has enough strength and structure to serve as an inside-outside hub where these very challenges and difficulties get aired and debated and solidarity commitments made. Here are the three challenges that come up most often for California.
First is that California higher ed labor unions may not see the value of a national organizing project. California is a mature labor regime that can pretty much stand alone (and hence ignore the rest of the country). It may not seem to matter that, in the absence of an industrially based higher ed labor movement, there has been no way for the many unions that represent higher ed workers to speak with one voice and provide a vehicle for horizontal solidarity between higher ed locals. It was important, with Project 2025 looming, that in October 2024 HELU managed to get the top national leaders of nine unions including AFT, NEA, UE, AAUP, CWA, OPEIU, UAW, AFSCME and UNITE HERE to sign a Statement of Unity.
A Unity Statement may seem like distant thunder given the urgent needs of higher ed workers at the bottom rank and file level. This is especially true in the California Community Colleges, where the wrong-headed 67% law, dating back to the 1970s, placed a cap on teaching load and helped create a vast statewide faculty that is majority part-time, low-wage and insecure. Lack of job security makes union participation risky, which leaves union leadership in the hands of secure tenured faculty who have given contingent faculty issues low priority. Now, after years of pushing, the One/Tier/United Faculty program at last promises some motion on this issue and this is where the energy has gone. Therefore California community college part-timers may not see HELU’s national organizing agenda as relevant.
The second challenge is the difficulty of organizing across job positions, the wall-to-wall challenge. Higher Ed is an old-fashioned hierarchical industry with serious prestige attached to some workers and none to others. This hierarchy is structured on race and gender, with an extremely disproportionate distribution of workers in top jobs being white men, and the low-wage, low-prestige jobs are largely people of color (especially women). Can custodians and tenured faculty strategize together and act in solidarity? The good news is that the workers in the low-prestige jobs are often unionized and highly competent in the skills and power of representation and bargaining. And what workers can most effectively hold the operation of a college or university hostage? Who can really learn from whom? Knowledge of a little higher ed labor history might come in handy here too.
Then there’s the coast-to-coast challenge. While HELU presents a national vision of a different higher ed system (see the Vision statement at higheredlaborunited.org), it is mind-boggling to figure out how to bring together workers in public and private non-profit institutions, not to mention the for-profits, workers in union-hostile or union-friendly states, workers in states without public sector collective bargaining (and where, as in some states, it is actually prohibited). Some states are way ahead of others; California is one of these. Then there are places like Florida and Texas, where the raids on higher ed make headlines. Beyond that are places like North Dakota where, in addition to having no collective bargaining agreements in public higher ed, there are also attacks on tenure. (CWA is organizing there, incidentally.) But these don’t make headlines. HELU has hosted numerous zoom conferences to bring together activists from different states and contexts but we are still at the level of self-educating and learning from people who are like and unlike ourselves. This is not a challenge that will be resolved top-down but it is happening in real time through the nuts-and-bolts magic of bottom-up solidarity.
The rising movement is the good news
The good news is the rising movement out of which HELU was born. While HELU is a re-set to industrial organizing of the 1930s, the multiple re-sets that re-shaped higher ed in the last hundred years all were responses to the demands of the time, facing the forces in play at the time. HELU spun off out of what felt like a state of ultimate exasperation: “The solution can’t be just a fix here and a fix there – we have to get in front of the whole problem.” The current demand could be described as a right-to-learn, anti-ignorance, what-does-the-planet-need demand.
An Inside-Outside hub for higher ed activists
DSA is a big-tent socialist organization of thinkers and activists. HELU is not an opposition site; on the contrary. But it does have the power to host the critical, open-ended debates that can be brought back to local unions and labor organizations and energize them. As part of an inside-outside hub, it’s an opportunity for us to break out of local bubbles. DSA members are already among the numerous students, grad student employees, union organizers, lecturers and members of professions like tech and healthcare that are often employed by higher ed institutions, and campuses are where some of the most energetic union activity is already taking place. DSA members bring a point of view that is likely to be historically grounded and capable of imagining strategy for an alternative vision for a whole society, not only the need for reforms, large and small.
What DSA members can do (individually and together)
The three dire challenges listed above will not be overcome without a lot of processing of ideas, a job that DSA is set up to do. You can start by looking at higheredlaborunited.org to see the structure and recent work done by HELU. See if you belong to a local California union that has already endorsed or formally joined HELU. If you don’t, and are curious, you can sign up to get communications and partake in some discussions. If you find that you’re already in a member union, sign up and ask your local leadership for contact information for the delegates that represent your union vis a vis HELU. If your local is not yet a member of HELU, start the process of organizational decision-making. If you are in higher ed, but not yet unionized, contact EWOC to get some help starting a union. If you are not in higher ed at all, you likely know friends, comrades, neighbors and relatives who are. Pass this information to them. Then, in either case, proceed according to the principles of equality and solidarity that brought you to DSA to begin with. With higher ed being a major employment sector in all metropolitan areas and facing the prospects of fully neo-fascist attacks, we can’t do any less to defend one of the important parts of the common good for the entire working class.